Here comes the blog post of an event named “WebVR Camp – Unlock VR World” which was organized at IMS, Ghaziabad on 10th February, 2018 under the “Activate Mozilla” campaign driven by WebVR India Team. The objective of the event was to learn and teach the development of virtual reality experiences using A-Frame. A-Frame is an Open Source WebVR framework developed by Mozilla VR team for creating virtual reality contents and scenes. According to Mozilla VR team, Having more developers and content creators playing with WebVR is important for the future of virtual reality to help build towards a free and open virtual reality platform not owned by any individual entity. Moreover, Having more contributors know A-Frame will give them a chance to get involved in one of the most exciting revolutions in the field of technology. So, what was me and my team waiting for ? We also took an initiative to support the organisational goal of Mozilla by diving into virtual reality that leverages the Web and teaching college students about A-Frame.

Finally , the day arrived with so much enthusiasm and energy among coordinators and participants. Firstly, a common session took place where we introduced WebVR and Virtual Reality. We talked about Open Source, A-Frame and Mozilla VR Community. It was an open and two way discussion. Participants were very active and took part in the discussion by raising their queries about A-Frame and virtual reality. Before I introduced A-Frame to them, no participant even heard about it and had no idea about this. This was really surprising for me.

I started my session by implementing few primitives and basic concepts. Participants started building their own scenes simultaneously. They found developing VR scenes very interesting and unique. Then I moved to some advanced concepts and explained the ECS pattern by giving real life examples. A break was given to attendees for one and half hours in which we offered snacks to all the participants to keep them energetic and mentally active (as it was a full day event). The break got over and we started a contest in which participants have to build scenes in groups and the one who created most creative scene was awarded with VR device and goodies. The event ended with taking feedback from the participants. Most of the participants said us to organize similar type of event on A-Frame in the future also. We then discussed future plans, takeaways and follow-up plans and set the final status of our event to “Successful”.

Quite long time, yes ! After a quite long time, I am here again to have some words with all of you who are reading this. As the IT world is moving with a fast pace where new technologies comes up in the market with a blink of eyes and where IT employees are expected to have full fledged knowledge and desired experience in that technology the very next day. I wish employees could be developed at the same moment the requirement comes up from an employee-vending machine with desired skill sets and experience. Wow !! It could have done wonders in IT industries all over the world.

Ok. Wait. Let’s come to ground level. We already have a very robust and strong education system in India. I’m not going to take you back to school days and start a traditional debate over education system. We all have been taught approximately fifty subjects in our college, subjects with huge diversity like our India has : Biology, Chemistry, Manufacturing, Physics, Mechanics, Computers etc. If we could have curriculum according to our specific interests and career goals, if universities could have incorporated the niche and trending technologies in their curriculum and emphasized on implementation rather than expecting 2 pages answer for a 2 mark question, we might not be suffering to survive in IT industry today or searching jobs with broken hopes as freshers. I wish we didn’t cram (Rattafication). Today, IT industry is talking about Machine Learning, DevOps, IoT, RPA, Data Science, Automation, Big Data testing and so on, our universities are still teaching us C, HTML and 75% useless theoretical parrot learning. Guys ! We are already lagging behind.

Let’s talk about some future-proof and promising careers and roles in IT industry which we can learn today and thus ensuring our retention in IT industry for at least next 5 years. Automation is changing the current IT landscape. Every IT industry is finding ways to automate their tasks as much as possible and completely shifting over automation practices. As this technology is promising business benefits and great efficiency and finding its way into more and more industries, however, it has brought with it a serious concern that human workers will inevitably become obsolete. Other trends and roles which are booming now a days are Data Scientists, AI/Robotic Leads, Automation Engineer, IoT Developers, QA Analysts, RPA Engineer, Cyber Security Analysts, DevOps Engineer (just to name a few). I am not going to explain each of these here as something named “Google” exists today in our lives. 😀

There are a lots of things related to this topic that are still left to discuss in this blog post. We will discuss it the next time we will meet here. Until then, let’s update out skill set according to the trends that we are going to see in 2018 and coming years.

The Mozilla Community Noida| NIET organised a sprint campaign on Firefox Quantum which is soon to be launched. The event as scheduled kick started at 9:30 am on the October 7th ’17 .
The event was initiated by Ms.Kirti Bharadwaj by welcoming the participants and a brief introduction about website testing and beta version of Firefox 57.

The mainstream website testing was then edified in detail by Mr. Vibhanshu Chaudhary & Mr. Samriddha Prajapati . The event gave the students opportunity of testing websites on beta version of Firefox 57.

The event gave an insight about the working of the beta version of Firefox 57 and basics of testing including running different websites on beta version of Firefox, finding the bugs and thereby reporting them. A detailed explanation was given on how to test websites along with examples. A large number of websites were tested along with participants showcasing the bugs they spotted and also reported the same on the official site .

The event concluded at 12:30pm with participants having positive feedback for the event !
Happy learning!

The bright sunny day of September 16th 2017 marked the RAIN OF RUST. The Mozilla Club Noida|NIET members under the guidance of Mr. Vibhanshu Chaudhary ( Mozilla Representative), were all buckled up and prepared to dispense the skill on RUST language.

The Workshop started at 9:30 am and was initiated by Mr. Prakhar Varshney with a initial introduction followed by the mainstream workshop headed by Mr.Ashish and Mr.Samriddha Prajapati. The workshop gave a detailed view about What,Why and How RUST is the language of tomorrow’s technological development.The event started with a “HELLO WORLD ” example and then diving into the intricate details of syntax, keywords, functions, looping and libraries of the language so as to give a proper insight to the subject.

With an interactive session the participants were involved in the workshop. On counting over the numerous fringe benefits of RUST the speakers gave a comprehensive lecture over the usage of RUST in different aspects. The questionnaire session was run to clear the doubts of the students and get their feedback regarding the workshop.

Further with the discourse of the Dr. Ajay Kumar Sir ( Director ), Dr. CS Yadav ( HOD CS Dept.) and Dr. Somesh Kumar ( HOD IT Dept.), the participants as well as the Mozilla Club volunteers were encouraged to organize more such tech-workshops to bridge the gap between the academic learning and market demands.

The workshop concluded at 1:00 pm and everyone applauded the event since this workshop taught them something that’s new, interesting and fruitful in their career.The workshop ended with participants satisfied and happy with the workshop but it also created a sense of inquisitiveness to learn more about RUST.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been fantasizing about rust as a system programming language and was just curious to know more about how flexible it is. Then I thought of sharing the knowledge with some more people and hence to get a couple of hands involved in this language. There was no other better option than giving out a free workshop for this language. Moreover I was much excited to tackle out the question and answers.

What and how does it works

I assure that anyone can learn and get hands on with rust in within a couple of days. This includes all the basics of this language and a complete overview of the internal features. Apart from the package of this you get a bunch of libraries which you can explore until you get tired of it.

Metrics Expectations

Students attended the workshop : 60+

Students who were not known to rust : ~55

Students who came to know about the rust : 60

Event success and response according to students who attended : Excellent

Covering the Basics

Three days are enough to get a basic overview of the language. There is not a need to go through each and every library. The only thing which you need to concern about is the keywords and the features. Explore the keywords and a feature-full system programming language which also enables working one the website more efficiently by providing a rich set of libraries. The event started with just a hello world example to students to showcase the basics of keywords, functions and parameters which it takes. The event carried on with constructing simple functions which carried 2 parameters and some examples were taken from rustbyexample.com .

Having a Flexible Course Material during the workshop

Carrying forward the workshop there came a point where people were upset because they were unable to get the complex structure on which rust is based. Pupil were even getting confused in passing the parameters to the function and it was getting hard for me to just showcase and make them understand how the workshop could be more fruitful if they had been a little quite.Further data structures were explained using rust and the workshop came to end just when a random student asked that how rust can be used to build websites and I started looking for an answer to satisfy him. After some reading some documentation and getting the docs of rust made my answer reasonable to be satisfied for the guy.

Conclusion

In the end, there was a generic feedback about the event and it almost everyone applauded for this event since they came to know about a technology which was unknown to them. Most of the pupil left the room with a happy face!

In the midst of sun showers , the Introductory Informal meet of the Mozilla Club Noida was organised at 2:30 pm on August 19th. The meet was organised at Bistro 7,Greater Noida . All the members of the Mozilla Noida Community which count upto 30 attended the meet.

The meet was organised to bridge the gap between the newbies and the existing members and to provide them in depth knowledge of the community and it’s working, the main motive was to put emphasis on community building and how the new members could contribute in the development of the Mozilla Noida Community.The meet was to interact with the newly recruited volunteers and to exchange different views , ideas and outlook over the budding technologies. The techie environment was apt for all the volunteers to get updated about the trending technologies.

Mr. Vibhanshu Chaudhary shared his experience of being a Mozillian and how this experience has helped him through his professional life and the opportunities he had a catch on because of his continuous contribution towards the community. Also Mr.Samriddha, Ms.Kavya, Ms.Surbhi, Mr. Shubham gave an insight about the club’s past activities and the perks of being Mozillian and a contributor. They also introduced the Activate Mozilla Campaign to the newly recruited members. The major topics that were covered :

GitHub

RUST

Open source softwares

Coming up Workshops

Apart from this , recruited students chose different contribution domains in Mozilla according to their field of interest under the categories of technical, non-technical , event managers and public coordinators. The budding new apps and technologies like GitHub , RUST , Bitcoin and WebVR were discussed in depth . A schematic insight on how to work over GitHub was also provided.

The mood over coffee table was light-hearted and gave the chance to the new volunteers to interact and get along with the seniors. The strategies for the upcoming workshops and events were also discussed. The students were happy and contented with the event and were excited about the upcoming events. The meet came an end at 5:00pm with happy faces .

An introductory session was organised by Mozilla Club Noida team at NIET, Greater Noida for new students on 22 July 2017. This event was an orientation program cum introductory event for new students who are unaware of Mozilla Campus Club’s presence in their college. The main motive was to introduce Mozilla, its mission, campus club program and to discuss ways to contribute to open source and contribution areas in Mozilla. 16 interested students were recruited as volunteers for Mozilla Club Noida. Mozilla Club Noida team also shared their experience being a part of campus club program and described their happy journey of around 2.5 years.

The event got kick started with lamp lighting by the institute officials and me. Ms. Kavya (core member) explained the gist of the Mozilla Campus Club and why should one join the club while Mr. Samriddha (core member) explained students the real meaning of contributions and where they adds up in our career. Along with this, he also discussed the perks of being a Mozillian and a contributor. Here are some of the points covered in the discussion :

Community is important than code

Contribution is the way to make things better

Contribution always repays

You should contribute to show your love to community

Mozilla Campus Clubs are the best way and place to learn and grow

The best thing which happens to you is you enjoy the community

Experience is all you need and earn

Apart from this one of the club members, Mr. Surya shared his views on being a part of the club and how far has his journey being till now. The session went smoothly and pupil were taking more and more deeper look into our activities and were excited enough to start the contribution by joining the club to which I added that they should start the contributions the right way. The event came to an end by 1:00 PM as scheduled and students were really excited and engaged during the session which could be concluded by the perplexed faces of some students.

I am writing this blog post about an event which was organised by Mozilla Noida Community on 4th June 2017 at Greater Noida. It was primarily focused on learning virtual reality development using A-Frame and then followed by a talk on Firefox Nightly web browser. A-Frame is an Open Source WebVR framework developed by Mozilla VR team for creating virtual reality contents and scenes. According to Mozilla VR team, Having more developers and content creators playing with WebVR is important for the future of virtual reality to help build towards a free and open virtual reality platform not owned by any individual entity. Moreover, Having more contributors know A-Frame will give them a chance to get involved in one of the most exciting revolutions in the field of technology.

We, as an open source technical community, believe that we need to keep ourselves updated in the technical world that is moving with a very fast pace where technologies are changing with the blink of eyes. To ensure the same, we (Mozilla Community) took initiative to organise a workshop on Virtual Reality which is an emerging technology and the next big thing in the market. It’s is going to add further cap in students’ academics and resume as well because there are very few developers of VR in market and it’s demand is going to increase tremendously in the future.

On the event day, we started with the basic concepts of A-Frame and talked about Mozilla VR Community. I started my session by implementing few primitives and basic concepts. Participants started building their own scenes simultaneously. They found developing VR scenes very interesting and unique. Then I moved to some advanced concepts and explained the ECS pattern by giving real life examples. After this, we all had our delicious lunch in one hour break. The break got over and we started a contest in which participants have to build scenes in groups and those who created creative scenes were awarded with VR devices and goodies. Participants developed their VR scenes with different ideas and their creativity. After this contest, some of the participants joined our talk on Firefox Nightly. Most of the participants were not aware of the Nightly version of Firefox. We started with installing Nightly on our systems. After installation, I introduced various cool and unique features of Firefox Nightly and how we can use them. Then we moved our discussion on reporting bugs to Mozilla and initial steps of getting started with QA. After this productive discussion, participants were excited and happy after getting Nightly stickers. The event ended with taking feedback from the participants.

A meeting was organised by Mozilla Noida Community on 11th April, 2017 to discuss the restructuring process of community and discussing strategies and plans to support Mozilla’s current focus initiative “Activate Mozilla“. It was chaired by Shubham Jain (Community Member & Club Captain).

One random glimpse after the meeting

Our current focus is to mobilize technical contributors and students in our region to contribute to WebVR and Rust. A lot of community members have been contributing to WebVR development using A-Frame and we left imprints of our success by organising a very successful event named “A Day of Virtual Reality” in the month of November,2016. We discussed about an event which we are going to organise in the month of May, 2017 that would be supporting MozActivate campaign. We also talked about how we can expand our community to reach desired goals. Every member stated how he or she can help in making the community better, supporting the open web and what can be the challenges in front of them. We also shared our thoughts on how we can educate other students by conducting technical events and advocate emerging technologies like Virtual Reality, Rust by conducting workshops. We looked back at individual contributions of members in the Mozilla Community and finally we discussed on takeaways, review and follow-up plans.

Well ! I am writing this blog after a long time. Usually, we all get busy sometimes in our personal or professional life. Something like this happened to me also. I got busy with some personal schedules and couldn’t make it to share my experience of testing the Mozilla Firefox browser and as a contributor in the quality assurance team of Mozilla India Community. Doesn’t it sound good ? Yes, it does. Without having testing background and knowledge of testing, I got the opportunity to test Firefox browser. I believe that we have to start from the very beginning if we want to learn something properly. Nobody can get expertise on a skill or domain instantly.

I found the testing process very interesting and I really enjoyed it for the first time and that too, testing the most secured browser “Mozilla Firefox”. I tested the 50.0b3 (Firefox 50 Beta 3) version first time in the month of September, 2016. I have tested other versions as well and I also test it currently. Testing of any application and product can be automated but before trying your hands on automation tools like UFT(previous versions are named as QTP), Selenium, LoadRunner etc., you should have deep and strong knowledge of manual testing and its concepts. As I am sharing my testing experience, I need to tell “ What is Testing ? “

What is Testing ?
In very simple words, Testing defines a set of activities that are performed to verify if the application under test (AUT) satisfies the end user requirements.

What is the purpose of testing ?
Testing is performed for a lot of purposes. Some of the purposes are :

To verify that all the requirements (both functional and non-functional) are implemented completely and correctly

To identify and fix defects before software deployment

To make the software predictable in behavior

To assess and improve the quality and so on …

Really, testing is an amazing and great domain to work for. After testing the Firefox, it developed a curiosity in me and interest in testing. Honestly, I am looking forward to work in testing domain as an professional. A software testing professional plays a vital role in software development cycle. What I often think in my mind and motivates me is that, any software/product cannot be released or delivered in the market (to the end users) until and unless it has been tested by the QA team. QA team ensures the quality of product and checks its ability to satisfy the requirements specified by end user.

In Firefox 50.0b3 version, I tested a lot of functionalities like Pointer Lock API, WebM EME support for Widevine etc. I am providing a few videos in this post which I recorded during testing the functionalities of Firefox. I hope these videos can give you rough idea of how manual testing is performed. Unfortunately, I forgot to record my voice along with the actions that are performed in these videos. But you can get mostly everything if you go through videos carefully and attentively. For videos, click here.

Got recognized on QMO first time

It was really a good experience of testing an application for the first time. I would like to encourage you to dive into testing at least once. You would really love it. If you want to join Mozilla India QA team as a contributor and want to have hands on experience of testing the Firefox, you are most welcome and feel free to ping me at @vibhanshuchaudhary (Telegram Handle) .